Coordinated atomic actions as a technique for implementing distributed gamma computation

The intentions of this paper are to discuss Coordinated Atomic (CA) actions and to demonstrate how they can be used in a very new application area. We apply this concept to designing a particular case of the Gamma computational paradigm, i.e. distributed Gamma computation. Within our approach, each Gamma reaction is an action. We demonstrate how Gamma computation can be effectively implemented in conventional distributed message passing systems using CA actions. The paper discusses our design and the benefits we gain by applying CA actions: allowing as much concurrency as possible, together with guaranteeing data consistency, a better system structuring, clear separation of different system levels, and additional flexibility. This experimental design and the Java implementation allow us to conclude that CA actions are a very powerful paradigm which can be used for implementing many complex systems and, in particular, software to support some parallel computational models and paradigms.

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